


He Mourns for the Change that has Come Upon him and his Beloved

by eudaimon



Category: Chaos Walking - Patrick Ness
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-23
Updated: 2011-12-23
Packaged: 2017-10-27 22:57:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,316
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/300967
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eudaimon/pseuds/eudaimon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The epic love story of Ben Moore and Cillian Boyd, and their friendship with Josephine Hewitt.</p><p>A glimpse at the events of the Spackle War and what followed through the eyes of Ben Moore.</p>
            </blockquote>





	He Mourns for the Change that has Come Upon him and his Beloved

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Aquila](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aquila/gifts).



> I loved getting to write a glimpse into this canon. I hope that it was what you were looking for. I looked and looked and couldn't find a canon name for Todd's mum, so she became Josephine. If she DOES have a canon name that I missed, my apologises.
> 
> HAPPY YULETIDE <3
> 
> (the poem quoted at the end of the story is [He Remembers Forgotten Beauty](http://www.poetry-archive.com/y/he_remembers_forgotten_beauty.html) by W.B.Yeats. The title is also borrowed from Yeats).

There was a time, a brief time, when the world was quiet, and it was just the two of them. Then Noise came like a tide. It washed some men clean away but they were fixed in firmer

foundations.

But before...

Listen: the first time Ben kissed Cillian on the mouth, he was fifteen years old and he thought that his heart was going to beat out of his chest. He'd never experienced anything like it.

When he was younger, Cillian's hair was longer and Ben had pushed his fingers into it and tilted Cillian's face exactly for the second kiss. It had been that easy, in the beginning. It had

been that simple to give his heart.

Maybe what he liked best about Josephine Carter (who was Jo Hewitt, just Jo, later on) was that she so effortlessly knew and understand. She had a love of her own by then and she recognised what there was between him and Cillian without having to be told about it. Because there wasn't always words to talk about the very deep, very wide and true thing that he felt.

But Jo knew. Because she had experienced for herself a thing that looked very much like love. Even from no effing distance at all.

It had been because of them, in the end. They were the ones who did the talking. Later, he'd wonder if everything would have been different if they'd never met, if Jo had been somewhere else that day when he went to the market, somewhere else with her blue, blue eyes and golden streaks in her hair.

What made him sad, later: that Todd resembled her only a little bit.

They were twenty when they boarded those that ship. Jo had a ring on her finger by then. Ben and Cillian had never worn rings, which did not make their promise any less true.

You. Forever. No-one else but you.

*

They did their best in the face of Noise. They watched people swept away by it, couples of who could no longer be in the same room of each other, couldn't stand to be around each when they couldn't keep anything back. One night, they sat in silence and looked each other, and Ben felt himself taken aback by the swell of it, the force of it, the _passion_ in it, but there, in the middle of it all, he found his own name, found _Ben Ben Ben Ben Ben_ like a prayer. And that was comforting, too.

He never knew how to explain that to Todd: that Cillian was angry, even before the war and everything that followed. That Cillian always had that in his heart.

For the first time, that night, he closed his eyes and did that trick that he'd later teach to Todd. He told himself exactly who he was.  
When he opened his eyes, Cillian was smiling.

*

When the war came, the war came hard and the less said about it, the better. They both fought. They both did what they had to do. Ben found nothing to be proud about it in. Cillian got angrier still.

And the Noise went on.

*

The Noise never stopped. Men went mad. And the women, sailing through the middle of it all, little bubbles of silence. But no calm. He remembers the pinched, cold look on Jo's face, sometimes, when she came to them after walking through the town. She was going big, by that point, still beautiful, her belly a tight parabola of her own design. She spent a lot of time in their kitchen. Ben cooked. Cillian made toys for a baby that was not yet born.

Dark times were on the horizon. He thinks that, perhaps, they knew that from the very beginning.  
The three of them did.

But they still found time to be quiet. Time for skin on skin and wandering hands, smiling mouth pressed to smiling mouth and _touch_ and _put your hands_ and _kiss_ and i love i love i LOVE YOU woven through both their noise.

Ben. Cillian. Not a bad way to spend a life.  
But different.

*

Jo was more present after the baby came. The whisperings had begun in the town. David Prentiss already spreading his poison, spreading his hate. Ben lost count of the time he spent at the table with Jo at his side, writing in her diary. He spent time with Todd, cradled him against his chest. He told them about Old World, about the way the ocean had looked, and the pebble beach near the house where he grew up. He told him the story of how he first met Ben and how Jo had looked, walking through the market that morning with a basket on her arm, when she was still Josephine and her hair was very, very long.

Cillian would come home with heavy, dark mud on his boots and his Noise full of everything, anything but what Ben knew he was thinking about but Todd was a beautiful baby and, at first, his Noise was all _warm_ and _safe_ and _Mum_. They did not realise how lucky they were in those first few weeks. Those last times together.

*

They caught them in the swamp. If he lives to be a hundred, if he always lives a good and virtuous life and does right by the ones he loves, that is the one thing that he will never be forgiven for - for not being there. For not dying when he should have.

*

So they went on, and all of them on borrowed time.

There was so little they could do. In the end, there was almost nothing. The men of Prentisstown (because it was Prentisstown by then) came howling like wolves at the door. They barricaded, as best as they could. They did what they swore they'd never do and took up arms again. All for her. For Todd. To protect what they had and what they stood to lose. They fought as hard and as dirty as they could. More than once, Ben bathed split knuckles and knotted bruises. Cillian wasn't so good at gentle words or touches but, in the end, then and later, he knew how to bleed.

They both bled. And the men of Prentisstown took her anyway.  
But they didn't take her far.

As long as he lives, Ben will never, ever forget the sight of Cillian in the doorway with Jo's body cradled in his arms. Her long hair spilled down, fair against his dark coat. There was blood on her face. There was blood on his face, too. Ben stood in the kitchen with Todd in his arms and then he looked and then he fought to never, ever think of it again, so that Todd would never, ever see it in his Noise.

And he never knew how to explain that the reason that Cillian was angrier was because he was the one who carried Jo into the kitchen and laid her out, who gently washed the bloody from her skin and wrapped her in a new blanket. And he could never explain that the reason that he was colder was that, because Todd didn't look so very like his mum but it was enough.

And oh, his heart. His heart was full to breaking.

*

They buried her under a stone. Some of the stones had words from the Bible carved into them, but neither Cillian nor Ben had any respect for that kind of Noise. So, they buried her under a stone carved with words from a poem that Cillian remembered from the place where he was born.

  
_Josephine Hewitt  
Born on Old World.  
"I press my heart upon the loveliness  
That has long faded from the world."_   


They never take Todd there, either.  
But they do their best.

Until the very end, that is what they do.


End file.
